Digital advertising in a way has considerably democratised entrepreneurship: Sam Balsara

Along with the Knowledge Seminars and panel discussions, Goafest 2023 is also holding a series of Masterclasses with industry leaders. Held on Day 2 of the festival, the first Masterclass of Goafest 2023 was conducted by Sam Balsara, Founder, Chairman and MD, Madison World, which explored ‘Media Planning in a Digital World’. The industry veteran shared his insights on why the digital medium needs to be leveraged for brand campaigns.

The Masterclass included a presentation where Balsara shared insights such as:

• Dramatically changing media habits, where the digital penetration has increased by 300 million in the past 5 years.
• More marketers want to target GenZ, who is the champion of multimedia.
• The audience’s increasing short attention span proving to be a challenge for advertisers, where they are paying for the audience to view the ad, but the latter is not viewing it.

As marketers operate with the above in mind, Balsara observed, “What has not changed is the marketer’s confidence in advertising to build brand and market share. It has remained intact, if not grown.”

The conversation steered towards the rise of AdEx being in line with changing consumer behaviour due to habits, COVID, low-cost data and low-cost phones. “Digital advertising in a way has considerably democratised entrepreneurship and business as it reaches smaller businessmen and even housewives,” noted Balsara.

Besides the power of the digital media, he also emphasised on its shortcomings that sellers and media planners must take on-board as intelligent people. These include:

Lack of spillover - TV can reach audiences beyond its target reach, but digital cannot.

Digital is inefficient for a large audience as it is bought on click-per-minute.

Viewability - TV and cinema offer 100% coverage, but digital format is gauged on 2 seconds. Digital screens are more cluttered, and the dwell-time is less.

Stating that “advertising is all about building brand equity, which is why advertisers are in business,” Balsara advised large brands to incorporate digital in their media plans, because of digital’s unique capabilities and because time spent on TV is coming down.